Powerful Coulomb-drag thermoelectric engine

Abstract

We investigate a thermoelectric nano-engine whose properties are steered by Coulomb interaction. The device whose design decouples charge and energy currents is made up of two interacting quantum dots connected to three different reservoirs. We show that, by tailoring the tunnel couplings, this setup can be made very attractive for energy-harvesting prospects, due to a delivered power that can be of the order of the quantum bound [R. S. Whitney, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 130601 (2014); Entropy 18, 208 (2016)], with a concomitant fair efficiency. To unveil its properties beyond the sequential quantum master equation, we apply a nonequilibrium noncrossing approximation in the Keldysh Green's function formalism, and a quantum master equation that includes cotunneling processes. Both approaches are rather qualitatively similar in a large operating regime where sequential tunneling alone fails.